1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a touchless system for recognizing an individual. The touchless system may be used in connection with a system and method for monitoring hand washing or the application of a disinfectant to a user's hands through pattern recognition.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
In food service, food packing plants, medical care facilities and so forth, it is essential that the employee wash his or her hands properly and/or apply a disinfectant to prevent the spread of disease. The movements necessary to apply soap and wash one's hands or to apply a disinfectant and spread it on one's hands are well known, but ensuring that each employee practices them consistently continues to be a management problem.
In addition to monitoring that hand washing or disinfectant application has been correctly done, it would be desirable to have a touchless method of identifying the employee to avoid passing germs and other substances from one person to the next through contacting the same surface such as a card reader, box-type hand recognition system or the like. It would be an added bonus if the equipment used for monitoring hand washing or disinfectant application could also be used for employee identification.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,038,331 to Johnson for Apparatus and Method for Monitoring Hand Washing describes an effective system for monitoring the application of soap to a subject's hands. The present invention is an extension of the apparatus and systems described therein.
The following references are incorporated by reference herein: U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,038,331, 6,122,042 and 6,292,575; “Unsupervised Segmentation of Color-Texture Regions in Images and Video,” Y. Deng and B. S. Manjunath; “Texture Classification Using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform,” S. Hatipoglu, S. K. Mitra and N. Kingsbury, Image Processing and Its Applications, IEEE Conference Publication No. 465, 1999, 344-347; and “Unsupervised Segmentation of Color Images Based on k-means Clustering in the Chromaticity Plane,” L. Lucchese and S. K. Mitra, 1999 IEEE, 74-78.